Neil Jordan’s Byzantium may well be stylish and moody — so moody, in fact, I wanted to send it to its bedroom with the instruction it could only come down again when less sulky — and Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan may well be fine actresses, but yet another vampire film? Really? True, it plays with the tropes a little. There’s a mother and daughter twist. There are no pointy teeth, just pointy thumbnails. But that thing vampires do, after they’ve sucked human blood and then look up, with blood-smeared lips and chin? That’s here, plentifully, and it always makes me wonder why vampires have such bad table manners. Weren’t they taught any, while growing up? Seriously, I’ve seen toddlers who have only just learnt to feed themselves master a pot of Petits Filous with less mess. In fact, if vampires spent as much time concentrating on eating nicely as they did on being undead, I might even take to them more. (Not much more, I expect, but a little.)
Jordan, of course, staked his claim on this genre back in 1994, with his adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, but whereas that was rather camp this takes itself wholly seriously. It opens as mother and daughter, Clara (Arterton) and 16-year-old Eleanor (Ronan), arrive in a down-at-heel seaside town where Clara immediately seduces a bereaved lonely fella and sets about transforming Byzantium, his supposedly derelict hotel — it looked rather nice, actually — into a brothel, to earn money. The hotel has one of those old-style lifts with metal gates, and as soon as you see one of those old-style lifts with metal gates your first thought is someone is going to get stuck in there at some point. I don’t want to tell you if you’re right because that would be a spoiler, so will only say this: you’re so not wrong.
Now, as they nosh their way, messily, through various humans, it becomes increasingly clear they have different preoccupations. Clara presses her pointy thumbnail into the neck of men who would otherwise abuse her, while Eleanor, who is troubled by her conscience, presses her pointy thumbnail into the necks of elderly people who are about to die anyhow. Mercy killings, if you like. Either way, they leave quite a few bodies they never have to account for to the police or anything, which is lucky, as how would they?
Meanwhile, Ronan, who narrates portentously throughout, finds a boyfriend, a sickly fella, Frank (played by the incredibly sickly-looking Caleb Landry Jones), and enrols at a school with him. For a class assignment, she writes her true story, in the hope that revealing her secret will somehow free her and she can go to KFC or Pret A Manger, like everyone else.
The story, which goes back 200 years and is woven into the drama in periodic flashbacks, as per, is a Georgian melodrama involving rape, prostitution, a woman wronged, TB and Clara finally escaping to an island where vampires and eternal life are created, and where the waterfalls gush crimson paint for blood. Clara had no right to visit the island, as women vampires are banned, and now, to complicate matters further, the brotherhood are after her. Yikes!
I can, I think, sort of see where Jordan is trying to go with all this, particularly with Eleanor, who must grapple not so much with her predicament, but with her humanity. However, this grappling is an inert business, that most often involves staring into the middle-distance, at a sea which is always grey, as is the sky. It’s melancholia at its most trying — buck up, girl!
As to the other things going on, there may be gender politics afoot although, if there is, it’s all far too convoluted to make any particular sense. Arterton and Ronan are both fine actresses and the fact I couldn’t believe in their characters for a nanosecond has, I believe, nothing to do with them, and everything to do with the overblown Gothic plot, the moodiness laid on like lard, and all the heavy-handed dialogue, an example of which I would have written down, had I been professional enough to have brought a pen and paper to the screening. (I am wondrously unprofessional; ask anybody.) Anyway, I hope this is the last I see of vampires for quite a while and if there are any mummy vampires out there, can I make a suggestion? Teach your kids to wipe their mouths, at the very least.
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